Better Beaters - Building Cars and Daily Drivers

 Saying goodbye to another car.

1997 Supercharged Riviera.

My life with the Riviera is coming to an end.

I have decided that I will be putting the Riviera up for sale. It's not that it's a bad car, and it actually has a lot of good things going for it. 

It's got low mileage, and it's in pretty good shape. The interior is in great shape and the original paint is also very shiny.

It all comes down to simplification and space. Two things that I really need.

A very well developed power plant,
though it can be a headache to work on.

A couple of months ago I had finished replacing the water pump. I'd buttoned it up and got it running and was able to back it out of the garage. After I moved it I found that the supercharger belt had jumped off the pulleys. The main serpentine belt was fine, and the engine can run without the supercharger being on line.

I cut the old belt off and decided that I would let the situation stand until I was ready to deal with it. 

I didn't know how this had happened. Maybe I didn't have the belt properly seated before I started the engine up? Or maybe the tensioner was bad and it left too much slack in the belt. I considered replacing the tensioner, but it was quite expensive. I had manipulated it with a wrench and it seemed to have the proper function. This time after replacing the belt, I would double check that the belt was tight before firing up the engine.

When the time came, I ended up doing the job in the driveway. The weather had cleared up and there was going to be a spell of clear weather. 

As before, this was a difficult and frustrating job.

Nothing complicated or frustrating about this!

Having done this before, I hoped that I would be able to do the job quicker. I was successful in some ways. 

I decided to buy the belt locally, instead of ordering through Rock Auto, I wanted to be sure that I got the right belt, right away, so that I could do the job whenever I was ready to start. 

These diagrams never show the engine mount/bracket
that the belts thread through.

Not too say that it wasn't frustrating, because there isn't a way to do this much easier. The top motor mount has to be removed, as well as the aluminum engine bracket, which mounts to the engine block at three points.  

The supercharger belt threads through this bracket.

This time I didn't completely drop the power steering pump, I just loosened it up enough that I could loosen one of the engine bracket bolts, and that would allow me to pull the bracket away from the block where I was able to squeeze the belt through the little gap. 

I had to sleep on it for a night, but I eventually got it together.

If nothing else they are cute.

I stopped by Harbor Freight and bought a set of stubby wrenches as I thought that it might make the job easier. Sometimes there isn't  enough space to turn a standard size wrench, and anyway it's always fun to buy more tools. 

My efforts were successful and there were no problems with the belt after start up., I guess that I hadn't seated it correctly the first time. 

Of course as with all of my hobby car purchases I will be losing money on the sale. There were a couple of expensive purchases that I made for the Riviera. The new set of tires being the most costly at over 600 dollars.  New tires can only be amortized by actually using the car, you are probably not going to recoup most of the cost at sales time. Likewise the stereo system, which I had replaced with an OEM re-manufactured unit that cost me almost 400 dollars. But I wanted to maintain the original appearance.

With the cassette, you can make your
 own mix tapes!

I originally bought the car because I wanted to become more active in the Rivera Owners Association. I have been a member off and on for over twenty years. There haven't been any club activities in Northern California, and I thought that I might act as a kind of regional coordinator and see if there was enough interest among members to justify initiating regional activities.

I'd had this idea over twenty years ago, back when the club published a semi annual roster of members. But in those pre-internet/e-mail days it would be a very immense, time consuming, and costly, undertaking. Just the expense of buying stamps was enough to dissuade me. I was also in the middle of raising a family, besides being busy with work.

This time I used the online roster to gather members contact info to send out a mass e-mail, and I advertised my plans on the club magazine and another internet forum. My plan was to use the existing infrastructure of local Cars and Coffee events. I thought that we could meet within those events. There were four C&C events that I targeted. I thought that this was an easy and practical way to gauge interest.

There were around a hundred members in the immediate area that I contacted. To say that there wasn't much interest was an understatement. I received five responses and I met with those members, only two were really interested, and only one showed up at an event.

Whenever I encountered a Riviera owner at one of these events, even if they weren't a ROA member, I tried to recruit them to the idea. 

I don't know why there was so little interest, though I'd only started going to C&C events myself, in the year before. As I've always maintained, everyone should participate in the hobby at the level, and in the manner that they want to. It's not my place to tell people what to do, I was merely extending an offer. 

I think that Cars & Coffee events are a great way for the public to see our cars, and for the owners to interact with our members as well as the public. I've seen many interesting cars and spoken with their owners who have been very friendly and accommodating, answering my questions. Best of all there is no pressure, and no cost to the participants or to the public. There is also a very solid network of events that are well publicized on various media.

Due to the lack of interest I decided to suspend my efforts. I am still going to attend those C&Cs, and I will still reach out to any Riviera Owners that I encounter, but I decided that I wouldn't pursue the regional coordinator thing any further. 

I decided to just pursue my own personal interests and concentrate on the goals for my own car hobby participation. Due to my age, I figured that I better get started doing the things that I wanted to do with the time left for me, which calls for increased focus.

This calls for making some tough decisions and becoming more realistic about my prospects. My emphasis will be on moving forward.

So long old Riv,
we'll always have Mendocino.